America: Our Current Problems and Future Solution

A major problem that America is currently having is gun violence. Nowadays, all everyone hears about on the news is a person or group of people get injured or passing away due to excessive violence with guns. Whether it be police brutality against people or school shootings, it’s becoming too much of a problem in our country. Every time something like this happens now in our society, it’s not talked about enough and not many people do anything to make a change happen. When tragedies like these occur, it gets attention for at least two to five days, maybe a week at most and then some new trend starts and the situation gets immediately thrown under the bus. That’s a big problem. When most people think of the American Creed or just America as a whole, they assume that everyone is equal and treated with the utmost respect. That’s certainly not true with all this violence going on.

When it comes to police brutality, it usually happens against African Americans. I remember watching the news one day and hearing about how a guy was being chased by the police because they believed he had a gun on him. They eventually caught up to him and when the guy was reaching into his pocket to get something, he was shot by police and eventually passed away. When they searched him, they realized that he was just trying to get his phone out of his pocket and there was no gun. The police just assumed he had one for the simple fact that he was an African American man. When these incidents happens, the police usually do not receive the right punishment for their actions. Most police officers just get suspended from their duties and then eventually start doing their job again like nothing ever happened. A clear solution to this problem is to fire the police who do these things and find people who are willing to do the job they are actually supposed to do, which is to protect their fellow citizens, not hurt them.

It’s bad enough that we’re starting to having problems with guns around adults, but now teens are starting to make it even worse. I’ve heard about so many school shootings this year and it’s heartbreaking every time. People will always use the excuse that they have a gun because they want to protect themselves and their family, but what happens when a child or teen in that family gets a hold on it because they didn’t hide it well enough? That gun will end up being used for all the wrong reasons, in this case, school shootings. Just like the topic of police brutality, these kind of events don’t get talked about enough before a new trend starts and everyone starts paying attention to that instead of the real issues. That’s a problem with a lot of people in America today. We get distracted too easily and never want to face the reality of things, at least until it happens to ourselves or to people we love. I could even say that a lot of people that live in America are selfish. We don’t want to pay attention to other people’s problems as long as it doesn’t affect us. How can a country claim to be equal if the people in it don’t care about each other as much as they should? That can’t happen because America would be lying to themselves and to other countries.

Instead of always trying to avoid the problem, we should be trying to think of a good and effective ways of stopping them. Like I mentioned before, any police officer that is involved in any kind of unnecessary violence towards any citizen to the point where that person’s life is at risk, they should lose their jobs and should never be able to own a gun. The majority of people really don’t need guns but if they do have one, they should keep it in a place where they only know about. It keeps the rest of their family safe and it keeps any children or teens from getting ahold of it, which is something that can prevent school shootings. If we really want to be equal and show that we’re actually respectful of one another, then this problem needs to be resolved as soon as possible.

America is built on this idea that everyone in it is equal, regardless of ethnic background, religion, sexual orientation, etc. No matter what you look like or how you act, you’re treated like everyone else. While that may be true in some aspects, America still has a lot of improving to do. If we want to live up to our expectations, we have to learn to make the changes necessary in order to do so. That’s when we’ll all actually be more equal and united.